Remembering James Baldwin

As I go about things these days and hear so many divisive voices, I often feel that there is great pressure on us all to be what other people want us to be and I sometimes think of James Baldwin, a writer who became a major American voice of the civil rights movement but at the same time maintained his uniqueness and ultimately believed that our individual nature was the thing that connected us.

“I was not born to be what someone said I was. I was not born to be defined by someone else. But by myself, and myself only.”

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

James Baldwin

When you understand that then you can move toward reconciliation and forgiveness. You can ‘be kind to one another, tenderhearted and forgive one another”, as it says in Ephesians.